The Residents

Perhaps the most straightforward tidbit about The Residents to pass along is the name of this oddball art-pop band’s ongoing 40th anniversary tour, “Wonder of Weird,” which includes a Tuesday stop at the Belly Up in Solana Beach.

A Christmas stage theme for a concert in February? It’s a nod to the group’s lone carol (ahem, “carol”), “Santa Dog,” a track from 1972 that The Residents periodically reinterpret in new recordings. Key line: “Santa Dog’s a Jesus fetus.” The tune may have been lurking in Primus leader Les Claypool’s head when his band created the “South Park” theme.

The Residents have made a habit of not playing it straight for 40 years, as evidenced by their 1980 release “Commercial Album,” which features 40 songs, all exactly one minute long.

The story goes that the band’s members left their native Shreveport, La., for the Bay Area in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Their artistic experimentation eventually led them to become The Residents, with anonymity a central tenet. The band’s members never use their real names and have never been photographed without wearing disguises, for many years capped by large, head-sized eyeballs.

Musically, they settled on rock’s outskirts, where they could treat conventional forms like taffy and concoct bizarro conceptual pieces. The group’s managers, Homer Flynn and Hardy Fox, handle press duties. Flynn has long dismissed suspicion that he’s, in fact, a Resident. Fox, too.

“Everything has been asked. Everything has been talked about, in one way or another. That’s fine, that’s good,” Flynn said during a recent phone interview.

Only in recent years did the members of The Residents, now down to three from the original four, take names: singer Randy, keyboardist/computer guy Chuck and guitarist Bob.

“I see this as (part of) the way they are embracing social media, and playing with it,” Flynn said.

The band has Twitter and Facebook accounts. Chuck goes by “Charles Bobuck” on his Facebook page. (That last name just might be fake.) Randy chronicles tour stops on Tumblr
(randyresident.tumblr.com), where he also posts pictures of his cat, Maurice.

“I think in a lot of ways they felt like the (Residents’) whole completely remote-distant-faceless thing — best epitomized by the eyeballs — they kind of felt like that was passé,” Flynn said. “(They felt like) they had done that and they really needed to bring themselves into the new millennium.”

Add top hats and tuxedos to eyeball masks and you have the group’s classic form of identity protection, first seen on the artwork for their 1979 album “Eskimo,” the soundtrack to an alleged “Arctic cultural documentary.” The outfits have now been retired, Flynn said. Press coverage of The Residents’ current tour shows Randy as a “seen-better-days” Santa, with Chuck and Bob sporting fake dreadlocks and welder masks. While “Wonder of Weird” does not boast the production values of past jaunts, it’s more than fans used to get.